This paper examines the claim that the historical election of Barack Obama demonstrated a new era of postracial politics in America (Ceaser et al., 2009). Drawing on arguments in the recent American political development literature (King and Smith, 2005; Novkov 2008), this research proposes a racial tension theory to link Obama’s White voter support to the deep-seated racial tension at the state level. In doing so, a theoretic and empirical solution is offered to solve the problem of high correlations between the major contextual variables measuring Black density (Key 1949), racial diversity (Hero 1998), state political culture (Elazar 1984), and social capital (Putnam 2000). The converged findings based on multiple methods clearly show that the state-level White support for Obama in both 2008 and 2012 was directly related to the racial tension of a state. In contrast, racial tension did not affect the White vote for John Kerry, the Democratic nominee in the 2004 Presidential election.

Contrasting perspectives on racism and racial inequality collide in contemporary Cuba. On the one hand, government officials argue that Cuba is a racially egalitarian country; though vestiges of historical racism subsist, systematic discrimination does not. On the other hand, social movement actors and organizations denounce that racism and discrimination are systemic and affect large sectors of the Afro-Cuban population. To draw these visions into scholarly dialogue, our analytic strategy consists in the comparative examination of both narratives as well as the empirical bases that sustain them. Using data from the 1981, 2002, and 2012 Cuban Censuses for the first time, as well as various non-census evidentiary sources, both quantitative and qualitative, we examine how racial inequality has evolved in Cuba during the last decades. Our analyses of census data suggest that racial stratification has a limited impact on areas such as education, health care, occupation, and positions of leadership. We find, nonetheless, that an expanding and strikingly racialized private sector is fueling dramatic income inequality by skin color beyond the reach of official census data. Our analysis sheds light on how different data can convey profoundly different pictures of racial inequality in a given context. Moreover, we highlight that significant contradictions can coexist in the lived experiences of racism and racial inequality within a single country context.

Much of the pivotal debate concerning the validity of affirmative action is situated in a legal context of defending or challenging claims that there may be broad societal gains from increased diversity. Race-conscious affirmative action policies originally advanced legal sanctions to promote racial equity in the United States. Today, increasingly detached from its historical context, defense or rejection of affirmative action is otherwise upheld to achieve diversity. A “diversity” rationale for affirmative action calls for increasing tolerance of the “other,” reducing negative stereotypes, and moderating prejudice as goals—all objectives that deviate from the former aim of race-targeted inclusion intended to resolve racial discrimination in employment and college admissions. Diversity policy provides a tapered defense for affirmative action, one detached from principles of justice and equity. The current article suggests that, despite the fact that the ostensible benefits of “racial inclusion as diversity” may be the remaining legal prop for affirmative action in the U.S., there is a need to consider whether diversity intrinsically can engender the benefits that affirmative action policy seeks to provide.

Much of the scholarship on poor Black urban communities focuses on social disorganization at the neighborhood level and how Blacks experience various institutional inequalities that impact their access to quality education and housing, jobs, and equitable public transportation. But Black social life is not a monolith of chaos, subjugation, and inequalities, nor is it confined to stationary neighborhoods. Black urban life is in fact vibrant, celebratory, and communal. Using two years of ethnographic observations on Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) buses and trains, we highlight the sociality of Black mobile experiences within Black spaces. Specifically, we examine how Blacks, while traveling into and through majority Black communities, form positive intraracial relationships that we refer to as Black transit affinities, which are a type of actively developed, temporal, meaningful interactions that take place on mobile systems. These transit affinities move beyond linked fate and solidarity but are actively formed and have four distinctive features, they are: 1) personal; 2) mutually engaged; 3) actively maintained although interrupted by stops on the bus or train; and, 4) particular to majority-minority areas of the city. These transit affinities are intraracial and were not observed, as defined, interracially or in majority White areas of the city. We do not argue that they are exclusive to Blacks but that they took place among Blacks in Black spaces that have often been ascribed a narrative of disorganization, violence, and social fragmentation.

While the socioeconomic status (SES)–psychological distress gradient is well-documented in the social science literature, less attention has been devoted to how this relationship varies within sociodemographic subgroups. I contribute to this small but growing literature by first examining the relationship between multiple dimensions of SES and two measures of psychological distress (depression and anxiety) among working-age African Americans. I then test whether three social mediators explain the SES–psychological distress relationship, and whether gender modifies these associations and/or the social mediators that shape them. To address these aims, I analyze two waves of population-representative data from the Detroit Neighborhood Health Study (N=685). Data were collected between 2008 and 2010 in the wake of the Great Recession. I utilize structural equation modeling with latent variables to assess these relationships, and test indirect and conditional effects to detect the presence of mediation and/or moderation, respectively. Findings revealed associations between higher total household income and lower levels of depression/anxiety, as well as unemployment and increased depression/anxiety among working-age African Americans. Furthermore, higher educational attainment was associated with reduced anxiety, but not depression, in this population. Gender moderated these findings such that unemployment was associated with higher levels of depression/anxiety among women but not men. I also found that trauma mediated the relationship between unemployment and depression/anxiety as well as educational attainment and anxiety. Gender, however, moderated the association between unemployment and depression/anxiety via traumatic events such that the relationship was stronger among women than men. Collectively, these findings contribute to our limited understanding of African Americans’ mental health and underscore the importance of how both socioeconomic forces and life course experiences with traumatic events contribute to poor mental health among this population.

Using a wide array of official and unofficial data spanning two decades in the neighborhoods of Chicago, we explore connections between legal cynicism, the electoral regime of Mayor Richard M. Daley, and citizen calls for police assistance and police reports of drug crime. We find that the disproportionate concentration of legal cynicism about law enforcement in African American neighborhoods played a prominent and insufficiently understood role in building opposition to Mayor Daley’s political machine. This race linked legal cynicism was grounded in neighborhood concerns about effective prevention of and protection from drug crime. The more punitive than preventative and protective approach to drug law enforcement that characterized the politics of the Daley crime machine contributed to a legacy that foreshadowed the growing and ultimately explosive demands for new mechanisms of police accountability in Chicago.

I first discuss the Obama administration's efforts to promote racial diversity on college campuses in the face of recent court challenges to affirmative action. I then analyze opposition in this country to “racial preferences” as a way to overcome inequality. I follow that with a discussion of why class-based affirmative action, as a response to cries from conservatives to abolish “racial preferences,” would not be an adequate substitute for race-based affirmative action. Instead of class-based affirmative action, I present an argument for opportunity enhancing affirmative action programs that rely on flexible, merit-based criteria of evaluation as opposed to numerical guidelines or quotas. Using the term “affirmative opportunity” to describe such programs, I illustrate their application with three cases: the University of California, Irvine's revised affirmative action admissions procedure; the University of Michigan Law School's affirmative action program, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2003; and the hiring and promotion of faculty of color at colleges and universities as seen in how I myself benefited from a type of affirmative action based on flexible merit-based criteria at the University of Chicago in the early 1970s. I conclude by relating affirmative opportunity programs for people of color to the important principle of “equality of life chances.”

The late Booker T. Washington may be considered in four aspects. First there can be no doubt that his chief significance lies in the fact that he cannot be considered simply as an individual but that he is so inextricably woven into the national and even world movements of his day that his death becomes historic. Again, most Colored men in America are simply “Colored.” They are submerged in a great undifferentiated group; they are not considered as individuals but are lumped together as a “race.” Mr. Washington was more than “Colored.” He was an American, and the comments upon his career tend continually to emphasize the fact that such a struggle upward against terrific odds, such indomitable persistence and versatility of expedient was peculiarly American. After Frederick Douglass, Mr. Washington was the next great exemplification and revelation of problems of race and labor in America, so significant as to go to the very core of our democracy; and finally, there is to consider Mr. Washington's own personality: the silent, watchful, cautious man, rugged, nervous, popular but unsocial, slow but tireless.

The emergence of an African American and Latino-dominated coalition with the potential to reconfigure American government and politics at the national, state, and local levels is one of the most noteworthy developments in U.S. politics over the past two decades. Racialized mass incarceration and felon disenfranchisement are impediments to this coalition’s political power. Social scientists, legal scholars, and activists have long paid attention to how devices like poll taxes, English competency tests, voter intimidation, racial gerrymandering, and voter identification laws restrict participation and diluted the political influence of racial and ethnic minorities. This essay seeks to direct renewed scholarly attention to racialized mass incarceration and felon disenfranchisement as similar devices for suppressing and containing minority group political power.

The racial composition of couples is a salient indicator of race’s impact on mate selection, but how well do those in intimate partnerships know the racial identities of their partners? While prior research has revealed that an individual’s race may be perceived differently than how they identify, most of what is known comes from brief interactions, with less information on established relationships. This study examines whether discrepancies in the reports of a person’s race or ethnicity can be identified even within intimate relationships, as well as which relational, social, and attitudinal factors are predictive of divergent or concordant reports. We draw on the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (n=3467), a U.S.-based dataset that uniquely provides both the father’s self-reported race and Hispanic origin and the mother’s report of the father’s race and ethnicity. We compare reports of the father’s race/Hispanic origin from both parents to assess the extent of mismatch, and we distinguish between whether mothers view the father’s race as similar to or different from her own. We find roughly 14% of mothers provide a race and Hispanic origin that is inconsistent with the father’s report, with a large share reflecting differences in the self-identified and perceived race of fathers who are reported as Hispanic. Among mismatched reports, mothers are more likely to report a race/ethnicity for the father that matches her own, depressing the number reporting interracial unions. Perceptions of racial homogamy are especially likely when mothers view racial sameness as important to marriage. Further, mismatches are more common in the midst of weak relational ties (i.e. non-marital relationships) and are less common when both parents are college-educated. These findings reveal that intimate unions are a site where race is socially constructed and provide insight into how norms of endogamy manifest within formed relationships.

This is a story about gay/queer globalization unfolded through the narratives of Korean gay men in Seoul. In this paper, I make use of talanoa dialogues to apprehend the way race and racial hierarchies can provide insights into the conditions in which the gay subject in Seoul is intelligible in intercultural interactions. I present these narratives in the format of a thematic talanoa using Pacific Research Methodologies (PRM). In doing so, I advance a unique way to negotiate communication with participants in a cross-cultural setting, rendering myself visible as a racialized (Sāmoan) researcher. Empirically, I argue that the narratives of Korean gay men party to this study demonstrate how the Korea/local–West/global binary is an important referential, in that there exists a structural connection through immigration policies that facilitates a transnational convergence of local and global racial hierarchies. This connection, I also argue, helps to structure and position Whiteness at the apex of racial hierarchies around foreigner subjectivities in South Korea.

Friendships between members of different ethnoracial groups can help to reduce prejudice and ease tensions across ethnoracial groups. A large body of literature has explored possible determinants for the formation of these friendships. One unexplored factor is the role of an individual’s skin color in influencing their opportunities to befriend members of other ethnoracial groups. This study seeks to answer two questions: For ethnoracial minorities, how is an individual’s skin color associated with the likelihood that they will engage in a cross-ethnoracial friendship? Does the role of skin color depend on the ethnoracial combination of the two groups that befriend one another? Using waves 1, 2, and 3 of the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen and a series of multinomial logit models, the results suggest that the role of skin color is a function of the relative levels of social status of the two ethnoracial groups that befriend one another. I argue that lighter-skinned members of lower status ethnoracial groups have a greater likelihood of having close friendships with members of higher status ethnoracial groups. There is also limited evidence that darker-skinned members of a higher status group, specifically Asians, have a greater likelihood of having close friends from a lower status group.

This article examines the exclusion of Afro-Mauritians (or Creoles) in Mauritian multiculturalism. Although Creoles represent nearly thirty percent of the population, they are the only major group not officially recognized in the Mauritian Constitution (unlike Hindus, Muslims, and the Chinese) and they experience uniquely high levels of socioeconomic and political marginalization despite the country’s decades-long policy of official multiculturalism. While scholarship on multiculturalism and nation-building in plural societies might explain the exclusion of Creoles as a breakdown in the forging of political community in postcolonial Mauritius, I build on these theories by focusing on the tension between diaspora and nativity evident in Mauritian public discourse. Using the politics of language policy as a case study, I examine why the Kreol language in Mauritius—the ancestral language of Creoles and mother tongue of the majority of Mauritians—was consistently rejected for inclusion in language policy until recently (unlike Hindi, Urdu, and other ethnic languages). In my analysis of public policy discourse, I map how Creole ethnic activists negotiated Kreol’s inclusion in multiculturalism and highlight their constraints. This analysis shows that through multiculturalism, non-Creole political actors have created ethnic categories of inclusion while reciprocally denoting racially-excluded others defined by their lack of diasporic cultural value. I argue that groups claiming diasporic cultural connections are privileged as “ethnics” deemed worthy of multicultural inclusion, while those with ancestral connections more natively-bound to the local territory (such as Creoles, as a post-slavery population) are deemed problematic, culturally dis-recognized, and racialized as “the Other” because their nativity gives them a platform from which to lay territorial counter-claims to the nation.

Using data from the 2008–2016 American Community Survey, we compare the racial identification responses of the Mexican-origin population residing in California to their counterparts in Texas, the two states with the largest and most established Mexican-origin populations. We draw on existing theory and research in order to derive a theoretical account of state-level historical mechanisms that are likely to lead to varying patterns of racial identification within the two states and a set of propositions predicting the nature of this variation. Results indicate that the Mexican-origin population in Texas is substantially more likely to claim White racial identification than their counterparts in California, even after accounting for factors related to racial identity formation. Further analysis indicates that this result is robust and buffets the notion that the historical development of the racial context in Texas has engendered a present-day context in which “Whiteness” carries a distinctive social value, relative to California’s ethnoracial context, and that this social value is reflected in the ways in which individuals of Mexican origin respond to race questions on U.S. Census surveys.

Recent immigration and migration patterns have altered the ethnoracial composition of Alameda County, California. Sociopolitical leaders have struggled to adjust to these changes. In an effort to facilitate limited English speakers’ access to critical municipal services, Oakland—the largest municipal in Alameda County—passed an Equal Access to Services Ordinance on May 8, 2001, which is a groundbreaking language access legislation for the City of Oakland’s public administration. Using data from the 2000 Census and the 2005–2011 American Community Survey, this study examines the impact of bilingual employment policies on the ethnoracial segmentation of Alameda County workers. Logistic regression reveals that bilingual employment policies have reorganized both targeted (i.e., public contact) and non-targeted occupations within the local government public administration sector. Specifically, Spanish/Chinese bilingual speakers made gains in the public administration sector (the intended effects), while Black monolingual English speakers experienced losses (the unintended effects). The representation of Black monolingual English speakers in public contact jobs within the local government public administration sector declined by as much as 18 percentage points after the implementation of the nation’s first municipal-level bilingual employment policy. The impact of bilingual employment policies on the East Bay’s Black/Brown relations and African American’s hold on low-skilled jobs in service industries is examined.

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan’s administration initiated a dramatic policy shift towards a new housing voucher program, which simultaneously resulted in a near-halt in public and project-based assisted housing funding. When analyzing this historic policy shift, many affordable housing scholars have overemphasized race-absent narratives about fiscal austerity to explain the Reagan administration’s policy rejection of public housing and embrace of housing vouchers. To present a more comprehensive and intersectional history of the Reagan administration’s transition to housing vouchers, I employ an alternative methodological lens that I call Black feminist critical policy studies. This paper traces how the Office of Management and Budget and Housing and Urban Development officials relied on obscured racial and gender bias in their debate informing Reagan's alternative housing voucher program. By revealing the social bias endemic in the Reagan administration’s housing debate, this article illustrates that housing vouchers were not simply a neutral, cost-efficient policy tool but helped ensure low-income black mothers’ continued subjection to anti-welfare backlash, housing discrimination, and paternal supervision.

This project draws on psychological and sociological social psychology to investigate immigration policy opinions among native-born non-Hispanic Whites. Using data from a suburban Chicago-area county that has seen substantial growth in the Latino immigrant population, we examine Anglos’ opinions on three dimensions of immigration policy: preferred immigration rate, resistance to immigration, and assistance for immigrants. Our central hypothesis is that liberalizing effects of Anglo/Latino interpersonal contact are conditioned on Anglos’ recognition of hardships and barriers faced by Latinos. Five of the six interaction effects we estimated were highly significant: Personal contact with Latinos does promote more positive, progressive immigration policy opinions, but only among some Anglos—those who were acquainted with immigrants who had run afoul of immigration law or believed there is substantial local discrimination against Latinos. The results are reminiscent of James Kluegel’s (1985) analysis of White Americans’ views about affirmative action: “If there isn’t a problem, you don’t need a solution.” Affirmation of local anti-Latino discrimination was the stronger moderator of contact effects and also showed main effects on immigration policy opinion stronger than the effects of interpersonal contact. Denial of anti-Latino discrimination may be a means used by Anglos to defend their group position.

Hurricane Katrina was a horrible tragedy. Rather than reprising the obvious pitfalls of governmental response or the dire consequences of social inequalities, however, I pose a series of questions. In particular, I seek to highlight the blind spots and silences that the media frenzy generated. These range from the fate of the Native Americans and the complexity of New Orleans' racial history to the explanatory adequacy of the dominant narrative and the unreflective premise of the reconstruction effort. The precarious state of nature and civilization demands a way to think and act beyond short-term palliatives.